Participatory culture- Blogging

The participatory culture that I contribute to is Blogging. Blogging is an online community of social networking. People share their views and thoughts about various topics and publish them on the Internet for the public to see. Blogging is becoming so popular that news companies look to bloggers in the general area of an accident for information if they themselves cannot access the scene or, are where the breaking news has occurred. They allow people to express their own opinions on people and news that are around them. 

Although I think that I have only scratched the surface of the blogging world I do think that I have brought some interesting information to the table. I do not think I have experienced the full effect of blogging because an important part of blogging itself is to have feed back. Even though I have sent my blogging link to friends and family I have yet to experience the opinion from a person I have no relation to. I think that if I were to have both negative and positive feed back that it would help my blogging abilities. Thus far I think I have done an okay job, considering in the beginning I was a little scared of what people were going to think, or say about my thoughts and opinions on the topics I have chose. 

But I have come to realize that blogging is no different than having a facebook. I publicized my life on a social net work I have pictures, friends and family  personal information that I freely gave away thinking that only my friends were able to see it. Really in comparison this blog does not fully publicize who I am only my thoughts and opinions are exposed. Although I am sure that if someone wanted to pish information from me they could leave my blog page with quite a bit of information to help them along.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN2I1pWXjXI

Culture Jamming

Culture jamming is the destruction of a mass media or communication to illustrate a negative view of itself. We usually see culture jamming in an activist form, a social movement against commercialism. To be blunt, culture jamming is simply standing up for what we believe is wrong with a situation at hand. For example, if someone were to be a vegetarian and walked over to KFC and posted a picture of a dead chicken in a KFC bucket, and people were to notice the poster, that would be culture jamming. Standing up for what we see is wrong with the mass media and drawing attention to that problem by raising awareness where it all began.

Culture jamming sometime includes transforming a mass media into an ironic satirical illustration of itself using the medias original communication method of posters, commercials, billboards and much more. It is also known as media hacking, information warfare, terror art and guerilla semiotics all in one. Culture jammers  are all about exposing politics and corporations that use the media to control our behaviors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cjBhc3CZPE&feature=related

Mark Dery, The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax, December 23  1990,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE7DF123EF930A15751C1A966958260, November 26, 2008.

http://www.kentuckyfriedcruelty.com/

Buy Nothing Day!

Buy nothing day was originally invented by a Canadian artist, Ted Dave and was promoted by the Canadian Ad-busters magazine. The first buy nothing day was held in Vancouver in September 1992. BND was presented to the people of Vancouver as a day to assess the over consumption issue in not only Vancouver but throughout the world. Today, it is celebrated in Canada on November 25, while in other parts of North America it is celebrated on the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

Ted Dave, is an artist activist and an actor. He was working as a graphic artist of Georgia Straight and became increasingly frustrated with the cost of day to day living. As a result he decided to start Buy Nothing Day, which he states that, " Absolutely everything around us in the urban environment is set up to be coercive, to get you to by things spontaneously." Although this day is to promote restricting how many useless items we buy, many critics say that it will only promote  people to buy things that they need the following day. Ted Dave omits the idea by telling critics that Buy Nothing Day is simply a start in which people will eventually make better choices to restrict themselves from over consumption. 

Personally I think that Buy Nothing Day is a huge eye opener to the general public. My Media Studies class and I, last year had promoted BND  through posters and announcements to the school. It was interesting to see how many of us failed when the time came. Most of us didn't even realize that we had purchased something. It was almost like just a routine to hit up the cafe for one of their amazing cookies every morning. I am going to admit that I did this on BND and didn't even realize that I had failed before I even sat down in my homeroom class. I felt awful, I had been apart of a group of people who were promoting this day for weeks and when the day finally came I did exactly what I was not supposed to do. Could I have lived without the cookie, of course I could have.

BND opened my eyes as well as many others in my class, to see just how many things we waste our money on, and don't even realize that we have done it! Since that day, especially now being a university student living on my own I have learned how important it is to spend wisely. It is not always about where you buy things if it is "name brand", I can hardly tell the difference any ways. It is about doing what is better for not only our bank accounts, but for our environment.

 Between 2004-06 Canada has an total waste disposal of 52, 475, 943 TONNES. If those numbers aren't a big enough eye opener for one to cut back on their over spending on useless things, I don't know what will. Buy Nothing Day is certainly a  stepping stone for Canada and the world to cut back on their waste disposals, to help better our economy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_jpG6kv6Pw

John Mckay, Vancouver actor better known as an activist,  September 15, 2000, http://www.teddave.com/nothingtext.html, November 19, 2008

Stats Canada, Disposal and diversion of waste, by province and territory, 2004 and 2006, http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/envir32a-eng.htm, November 19, 2008

Net Neutrality

The most important issue we have with publishing information of any kind on the Internet is that there is no way of censoring it. Net neutrality, in Canada protects the rights for all Internet users to have the control to surf Internet content they wish to see. It promotes free expression in what content or information the users wish to publicize on the Internet. Websites like neutrality.ca disputes the idea of charging certain IP accounts more than others to access websites, it also supports the idea of presenting the public with more valid content. 

Writers who have ideas based on concrete and valid content are the kind of writers that net neutrality supports. It supports the interests of the public, focuses on the well being of the public without restricting what they can access on the Internet. Instead net neutrality promotes the idea that there should be a larger amount of valid information versus the countless amounts of 'jargon' that we are presented with today. The private interest, that the Internet is full of is what the government is trying to protect. Users who abuse the right to having control over what information they release and what information they do not. 

It has become a growing problem in Canada and in the United States. The government wishes to protect its people from online predators etc. Websites like neutrality.ca are asking the government to define the rules in which they would like to place on the internet.  

neutrality.ca